Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos Getty Images
The first night that Una LaMarche and her husband spent together in their Park Slope brownstone, they had to sneak past her parents, sleeping downstairs. Two decades later, LaMarche doesn’t have to sneak around. A lot has changed — LaMarche is 45 now, not 23, her son sleeps in what was her teenage bedroom while she and her husband took over her sister’s — but some things haven’t. Her mother still sleeps downstairs. On the morning we spoke, LaMarche forgot to bring her keys to school drop-off. “I had to call my mom to let me in,” she says. “It’s great, but I’m also like, Am I 12?”
Moving back wasn’t always the plan for LaMarche, but her mother, Ellen, steered things in that direction. She had bought the house with her now-ex-husband for $260,000, in 1991, and spent the years after LaMarche and her sister moved out “rattling around on three floors” above the ground-floor level where a tenant lived. When they moved out, she renovated the four-story building to become two duplexes, with an “If you build it, they will come” fantasy. Then, in 2020, LaMarche’s landlord refused to renew their lease. She and her husband, both freelancers who together made around $100,000 a year, had been paying $2,800 a month for a two-bedroom in Prospect Heights. It was starting to feel impossible to find more space for around the same price. The duplex, they had to admit, was kind of perfect. LaMarche and her husband now pay about the same rent as before for a three-bedroom at the top of her childhood home, which is now worth about $4 million. Nearby, a three-bedroom in a townhouse on 9th Street just listed for $5,450 a month. Another is asking $10,200.
There’s nothing new about multigenerational living in New York City. The brownstone was built for this, a product of a culture that predates the nursing home. But LaMarche is part of a particular subset: The adult children of the “Brownstoner” wave of Park Slope gentrification are now moving home. One person I talked to has two friends in the same situation; another told me she knows three other families doing it on their same block of Carroll Street. Their parents bought for a song in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, and are now welcoming the kids back to a Baumbachian fantasia of coffee shops and parks, Chipotles and Aesops, boutiques and enviable public schools. And home prices in the millions. (One family I talked to said a house on their block went on the market for more than $6 million this year, and then a relative spotted Katie Holmes house hunting.) They’re aware of their luck: “We would not be able to afford this apartment if my mother wasn’t my landlord,” LaMarche says.
Ella, a cooking influencer who lives near the park, moved into her mom and dad’s third-floor rental in 2017. When she had a baby the next year, she didn’t worry too much about late-night crying or other infant acoustics: “I’m sure if they didn’t know him, they would find him annoying,” she says. But the apartment is more than just a good deal for the neighborhood: The proximity also means a new kind of relationship. Visits don’t involve much fanfare — everyone is just there. Ella’s son is now 7 and sometimes traipses downstairs to gouge his grandparents’ cereal collection. He may have picked up the habit from his maternal grandmother, Hope. “I always call my daughter my ‘pantry,’ since she’s a fabulous cook,” she tells me. “I’ll be in the middle of making dinner and ask, ‘Do you have any mushrooms?’ and she’ll say, ‘Just come on up.’”
The relationship is fairly symbiotic these days: Ella watches her mother’s toy poodle, while Hope does the occasional pick-up and babysits. Ella’s husband helps shovel snow and is happy to fix everyone’s tech — a digital concierge in residence. “I don’t know how I could live without this kind of convenience of having these people around,” Hope tells me. As for the rent, Hope and Ella have no idea what money is changing hands month to month — their husbands worked that out. (A house on their block sold for $4.4 million two years ago, and a two-bedroom rental farther from the park is asking $4,300.)
Those prices are why Vanessa, a librarian who grew up in Park Slope, was house hunting in Yonkers and Riverdale last year. Then, the tenants in the brownstone her parents bought in 1982 moved out. She moved in with her husband and 5-year-old. And now she can wander upstairs to make sure her dad, who was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s, takes his meds. The situation is also comforting in odd ways. Like when she woke up on the first morning looking at the same shutters and moldings that were in her childhood bedroom two floors up. “It was really easy for me to feel at home here. Even though so many things are different.”
But moving home is not without its own complications. “On the one hand, how could I possibly complain,” says Alex, a surgeon who moved back to the family brownstone right off Prospect Park after he and his wife completed their medical residencies. They were loaded down with debt from med school and it was early in the pandemic, when house hunting seemed fraught. His parents’ place made sense. So did the $5,000 rent — a number they landed on to show his parents and his sisters that he wasn’t freeloading and to offset upkeep. Even so, small requests to his parent-landlords could feel contentious. His mom and dad had fixed the building up themselves in the late 1970s and put money into a 1980s renovation; they were attached to things as they were. So Alex and his wife felt like they had to tread lightly when they suggested upgrading the gutters, replacing a broken dryer, and installing a new lock. “Everything had to be a conversation,” he says.
The family left when Alex got a job at another hospital in Los Angeles. Soon after, a sibling left her place in Prospect–Lefferts Gardens and moved home. “The house requires a constant infusion of money or work or both,” Alex says of the decision to keep family nearby. Things have been smoother for her, he adds. Her husband has “a latitude I don’t have” when it comes to negotiating repairs, Alex explains. Why? “He’s not my father’s son.” (The new couple have already succeeded in convincing his parents to rip up wall-to-wall carpets and expose lovely hardwood — a major upgrade in what Alex described jokingly as his parents’ “Victorian funeral parlor” aesthetic.) And when it comes to what might happen to the house, after his parents die, he says the goal is to keep it in the family: “In a wild fantasy, what if my kids moved into that house?”
Well that will depend. Real-estate disputes are the bread and butter of estate lawyers, who have seen loving families break up over what to do with Mom and Dad’s house. Who gets to move home if there aren’t enough apartments for everyone? Can one sibling stay, if they can’t afford to buy out the others? And if they do agree to sell, they may not agree on when — after a renovation raises the price, immediately to pay off debt, or in a year or so, when the market heats up? When they do sell, should the sibling who has been living there for cheap get the same share? Thinking this through involves a lot of conversation and sometimes a cottage industry of coaches, mediators, and lawyers. One family I talked to had a contract in place to make things feel equitable that takes into account who lived there cheaply (a perk) and who will be responsible for their end of life care (a major task). But it doesn’t always work out cleanly: Sometimes the child living at home is forced to sell against their will. Other times there are just simmering resentments.
Ellen, who broke her home into two duplexes, tried to make sure the house can stay in the family while keeping the peace between her daughters. She put the brownstone in a trust, for her two girls, and paid to help her youngest daughter buy a home of her own, to get ahead of any conflict. So far, things are working out better than anyone in the family expected. Ellen returned my calls from a two-week vacation to Rome, made more relaxing because she didn’t have to worry about the house. If anything happens — if plumbers need calling, if a window was left open — her daughter will take care of it. But so far, no emergencies. Just “a lot of checking to make sure,” says LaMarche, who also expects her son will stay relatively close, too. He’s a teenager, and in this housing market, “I’m just assuming he’ll come back for at least a while,” she says. And why wouldn’t he? They grew up there after all. “For them, it’s just their house.”